Mejía López, Juan Ramón; (2025) Sasal Translations: Becoming Indigenous Pesh in Northern Honduras. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Lopez _Thesis.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 May 2026. Download (4MB)

Abstract

This dissertation is an inquiry into the ways in which hegemonic nation-making projects, dispossession, and ontologies intersect in the Indigenous Pesh village of Silín-Moradel, Honduras. At the onset of this work, I hastily formulated to the chief of Silín-Moradel an interest in learning ‘how to live as Pesh with others’, which prompted him to share in the experience of eating a cassava dish called sasal. Throughout this work I, investigate two interrelated problems which this initial encounter elicited: What must sasal be for it to be an answer to queries about living as Pesh with others? Likewise, if a sensory encounter with sasal is the response, what was the question? Such an endeavour has required tracing sasal as it is carried across numerous boundaries in a wide historical framework spanning 179 years in language exceeding translations. By drawing on ethnographic and archival sources, I argue that such translations are not only intentional, but generative within and across different logics and boundaries. Key to this is my contention that the Pesh partially inhabit a sensory ecology predicated on a substance logic in which bodies and selves are fabricated in relations with others, in a manner defined by the circulation of substance. The centrality of sasal, as substance, for fabricating Pesh bodies is enunciated in Silín-Moradel with reference to historical conjunctures marked by violent assimilation and dispossession through acts of conceptual creation. I argue that it has provided a response to a specifically Pesh problem on the possibility of the continuation of a distinct Pesh sociality. By acknowledging this iteration of substance as a philosophical concept emerging from concrete translations, I present an approach which enables novel ways of enquiring into the intersections between ontologies and emerging political configurations.

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